


Dream Girl

by Miss_M



Category: The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dream loses at cards. Desire cheats. Death dispenses home truths. Matthew has cravings. A nightmare does its job. And an apprentice dream confronts a man searching for the formula to a good night’s sleep.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dream Girl

**Author's Note:**

> I was messing around with the idea that the Dreaming might have fundamental laws which not even Morpheus can break – and how they might get broken regardless. Sort of like the Three Laws of Robotics or Thermodynamics, which, as we all know, are for wimps. :-) In the process I even delved into the scary hinterland of inventing my own characters to fit into the canon universe, and then *gulp* shipped them. Also, Morpheus may or may not condone the possibility that one of his subjects might murder a mortal… Yeah, I’ll just stuff my hands in my pockets and wander off, whistling unobtrusively. I own nothing except the original characters.

There are three fundamental rules which all denizens of the Dream Realm must obey:

1\. No mortal being may become part of the Dreaming without passing through the rites of death, and then only if Death comes to them while they are dreaming.

2\. No denizen of the Dreaming may kill another one of Lord Morpheus’ subjects. 

3\. Denizens of the Dreaming may sleep, if they so wish, but being dreams or apprentice dreams, they never, ever dream themselves.

These are simple rules. None contemplate breaking them, for without them the Dreaming and all who exist in it would surely perish. This is how it has always been. 

*

“Dream, will you play?” Desire’s voice was smooth as oil, sly as only s/he can make it. 

Desire is the most treacherous of the Endless. Death is, ironically enough, the most trustworthy – she always fulfills her promises, and never misses an appointment. 

“I do not play. You know that, sister/brother,” Dream replied. 

“Oh, come on! Don’t be such a spoilsport!” Desire chose to act petulant, even though s/he knew it would not work with Dream. Still, seeing the faint tick of irritation in the corner of his thin, pale lips was reward enough. 

“No.” Dream turned back to watch the landscape. The vertiginous peaks of the Hindukush were bathed in pale pinks and greens as the sun of many thousands of years ago rose above them. 

Desire shuffled the cards adorned with hand-painted pictures of elephants, maharajas and war machines which would fall into oblivion in only a few short centuries. The gold leaf and lapis lazuli on parchment glittered in the early morning sunlight. 

“We-ell,” Desire drawled, “you can just say you’re _scared_ of losing, you know. It’s _really not_ such a big deal. We all get _scared_ sometimes…” 

Dream did not spin around and glare at his sibling. Dream does not do that, ever. He observed the landscape a moment longer, then turned slowly, approached the small rosewood table, and sat down opposite Desire. 

“Deal the cards, sister/brother,” he said. 

Desire giggled as s/he complied. They played one game. Dream lost. His face did not change when Desire clapped her/his hands delightedly and shrieked with glee. 

“I won, I won! I beat you!”

“So it would appear.” Dream’s voice was cool. “Claim your reward.”

“Hmm,” Desire tapped her/his forehead with one impossibly long, perfectly manicured finger, pretending to think. S/he knew exactly what s/he wanted, of course. “I can’t think of anything right now,” s/he said coyly at last. 

Dream’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “Indeed? Is it not your function to invent confusion where there is none, and bring disorder into orderly lives?”

Desire glared. Her/his nature, her/his very function prevent her/him from being as blasé as her/his older siblings.

“Be that as it may,” s/he snapped, “you still owe me!”

“As I said, claim your reward.”

Desire closed one almond-shaped, kohl-rimmed eye and looked at Dream out of the corner of the other. “Can I ask for… _anything_?” 

“That is too broad a term to signify, sister/brother. I would advise you to ask for something that is within my power to give.”

“Very well, then. I will leave it for now. But when I decide what I want, I will come to you, and I will make sure it is within the reaches of your realm that my prize resides.”

Dream nodded. Desire snickered openly and gathered up the cards as Dream rose and walked away, trailing his long embroidered caftan over the marble floor of the ancient palace. 

Desire shuffled the cards dexterously and flipped three face up on the rosewood tabletop. 

The first represented two elephants, their tusks covered in metal barbs, colliding head-on in pitched battle. Their drivers’ frantic cries were lost on the enraged animals as they tore each other to pieces. 

The second showed a woman dressed in rags, standing in a huge primordial forest: she was out of place, yet did not seem lost. 

On the third card, a man lay dying, his hands clasped over the gaping wound in his chest, where his heart used to be. His face was contorted with surprise and pain. 

Desire snickered again, though s/he did not understand the significance of the cards yet. S/he dipped one finger in the painted pool of crimson blood on the third card and smeared her/his lips with it. Glancing at her/his reflection in a nearby silver mirror, Desire saw how beautiful s/he was, and laughed with delight. 

*

Midori could remember how she died. 

Not the exact moment of death, of course: nobody remembers _that_. The wrenching away, the change from living to dead is just too much. She could remember what came right after the moment of death, though, and she liked to think that it was quite different from what most people experience. 

There was darkness and distant voices distorted by static. She became aware of lying on her back on the hard ground. When she opened her eyes, she saw two Goths standing over her. A man and a woman. 

The woman was about Midori’s age. Her long hair looked like soft, black straw. _Like a Goth Tina Turner_ , Midori thought. She wore a black spaghetti top, black jeans and a silver ankh necklace, which was so huge Midori wondered how the woman – girl, really – managed to stand upright. _I don’t get Goth fashions. She seems nice enough, though._

The man was very tall and very thin. _Emaciated, that’s the word._ Midori wondered idly if he might not be ill. He was dressed in that flashy I’m-so-in-touch-with-my-dark-side style favored by his kind for a night on the town: black satin pants and a voluminous coat of what appeared to be black leather engraved with delicate coiling patterns that resembled spirals one moment, snakes and distorted faces the next. Despite her hard-rock sensibilities, Midori had to admit that the coat was pretty cool. If only the man were wearing a shirt, he would be almost cute. This way, Midori could practically count his ribs, and it made her flesh crawl. 

The girl bent down and peered into Midori’s face, a smile as bright as June sunshine on her powder-white face. 

“Hi! How are you doing?”

“I don’t know,” Midori admitted. “What’s going on?”

“I hate to tell you this, but you should probably have a look around,” the girl chirped. 

Midori tentatively lifted herself up on her elbows, then sat up. Neither Goth moved to help her. 

She looked around. Twenty yards away, a crowd of people in various uniforms was milling around a crash site. There was a lot of smoke. Two paramedics were pulling a limp body from one of the two cars which had collided head-on. Five bodies of various sizes already lay on the ground. The sixth body was laid alongside them. Midori caught a glimpse of her own face before a powder-blue sheet covered it. 

“Oh,” she whispered. 

“‘Fraid so. Sorry, kid, must suck to have to go so young,” the girl said with genuine if routine sympathy, as if she said this sort of thing all the time, and meant it. 

“Sister,” the man spoke for the first time. Goosebumps coiled around Midori’s spine at the sound of his voice. Neither cold, nor hard, nor particularly menacing, the voice seemed to harbor knowledge of mysteries too horrible for Midori to comprehend. _Must be a good shtick for picking up Goth chicks_ , she thought, but couldn’t shake her sense of unease. 

“Oh yeah, sorry I haven’t made introductions,” the girl said. “This is my little brother, kiddo.”

“Brother?” Midori’s wits were still a little blunted. It isn’t every day that you get to see your own dead body, after all. _And I’ve never even been outside of the country. And I’ll never graduate. And I’ve never kissed anyone._

She was shaken out of these common, terribly painful regrets when the man spoke again. “Mortal woman, I am Morpheus, Master of the Shifting Realms, Prince of Stories, Paladin of the Sleeping Marches.” 

“Dream King, for short,” the girl pitched in helpfully. 

“Dream King?” Midori parroted. 

“That is correct. I have a proposition for you, due to the peculiar circumstances of your departure from the mortal realm.” 

Midori stared at him a moment, then turned to the girl, who seemed to speak a more intelligible form of English. “What does he mean?”

The girl squatted next to Midori, who was still sitting on the ground. “It’s like this, kid. Because you died while you were dreaming, you get to choose: you can either come with me and see what happens, or you can start working for my brother here.”

“I fell asleep at the wheel?”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about those other people?”

“A family of five on their way to the seaside. Don’t feel bad about it, kid. I’ve seen it happen to the best.”

“And you are…?”

The girl smiled and winked. “Can’t you guess?”

“Oh. Right. Um, I guess you won’t tell me what happens if I come with you?” The girl shook her head. “And if I go work for him, then…?”

“You become part of his realm, the Dreaming.”

“Would I be a dream?”

“Not immediately,” the man said severely. “You will have to serve an apprenticeship, and may be promoted to the status of dream in due time.”

“Will I live forever?”

“Well, technically, you can’t live forever if you’ve already died,” the girl explained. “You would be entering a completely different order of existence. Time would not flow for you the way it flows for mortals. You could exist forever, but it wouldn’t be what you call ‘life’.”

“I see.” Midori tried to wrap her mind around this. She could hardly remember what she had been dreaming about at the moment of the crash. She wondered idly if this Dreaming place has some kind of bureaucracy that keeps track of stray dreams. “Does everybody who dies in their sleep enter the Dreaming?”

“Everybody gets the same choice as you. Not everybody chooses the same.”

Midori addressed the man: “Let’s say I do agree to work for you. What do I need to do? Is there a test or an ordeal? Or some kind of transformation? It always happens that way in stories.”

The girl smiled at the man. Her brother. “I like this kid,” she said. “She’s smart.”

“Don’t call me kid. I’m nineteen, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” the girl replied good-naturedly. 

“Stand up, mortal girl,” the man said in the manner of one who never even countenances the possibility of disobedience. Midori complied, figuring she might as well get off to a good start with her new boss. 

The man looked her up and down dispassionately, then addressed his sister: “What is this mortal’s name?”

 _Could’ve asked_ me _that_ , Midori groused silently. 

“Midori,” the girl replied. “Isn’t it cute? It means ‘green’ in Japanese.”

The man looked Midori square in the face, and for the first time she realized that his eyes were so dark she could not tell if they had any pupils. Though his lips did not move, she suddenly felt as if he were smiling at her in an unexpectedly benevolent way. 

“Yes. Yes, that will do.” 

He lifted a pale, thin hand in front of her face, and Midori’s eyes exploded in a myriad stars which cascaded like a torrent of silver sand between her and him. When her sight cleared, she still felt like her old self, yet she had been transformed into something rich and strange. 

This was how Midori entered the Dreaming and the service of Lord Morpheus of the Endless. 

*

There was a young man called Jackson who worked with sleep and computers. He sat in a white, antiseptic room where the only color came from his face – drawn and prematurely old from the losing battle against the specter that haunted his sleeping hours – and from the ever-changing graphs on his computer screens. The graphs recorded the biological stats of the six men and women who lay on white cots in an adjoining room, their bloodstreams brimming with experimental drugs. They would give anything in the world for an hour’s sound, healthy sleep. 

The young man who claimed to want to help them would do the same, and more. Sometimes he thought that he would give everything in every imaginable universe for the unconditional release, the dark, cavernous repose from existence, which is the definition of sleep. Sleep of the just, the innocent, the oblivious. He did not consider himself particularly just or innocent, but he knew he would appreciate the selfish sweetness of true oblivion. 

He envied people who said they never dreamed. If they thought they were missing out on something, they ought to sleep a mile in his bed and see what it was like to toss and turn and wake screaming from the same nightmare that had been with him since he was a boy, the nightmare which hadn’t lost its sharp edge in over twenty years. Or they should consider the cots where six volunteer insomniacs willingly gave their bodies over to the impersonal cruelty of science for the sake of a fragile hope, the last glimmering shred of possibility that the paradise of sleep may be attained in this life, on this plane of existence. 

Jackson hated the arbitrary nature of dreams. He despised how they flirted with some people, giving them always new images which never stuck around, never haunted their waking hours. They might be going to the cinema or doing their laundry for all the time and effort their dreams took up in their existence. For him, sleep was like a freak accident he survived again and again. It negated his whole sense of self without providing a logical reason why he of all people should suffer so. And no matter how many times he relived his nightmare, it never ceased to wrench his entire universe apart. 

He kept reliving it without ever being relieved of it.

His patients thought him a great philanthropist, thought he wanted to discover the miracle formula for sound, dreamless sleep for the sake of the thousands of insomniacs in the world. In truth, Jackson couldn’t have cared less if they all jumped in front of commuter trains tomorrow, which seemed to be the preferred mode of suicide for those who could no longer stand the absence of sleep. He liked some of his patients well enough, but on the whole they were no more personally important to him than the individual tastes and feelings of his victims were important to a serial killer. 

The irony of this was by no means lost on Jackson. 

*

“Hi, Midori! How’s it going?”

Midori’s arms were full of heavy, leather-bound volumes. She cracked a smile over the top book – a five hundred-page volume of poems John Donne discarded as too simple and understandable – at Matthew the raven, who cocked his head at her from a nearby shelf. 

“Tired and dusty, as you can see. What’s up with you, why aren’t you with the boss?”

“He has _company_.”

Midori cocked a green eyebrow. “You mean family?”

“Yeah.” Matthew did the closest thing to a shrug a bird can do, shaking himself as if trying to erase the residual memory of an unwanted caress. 

“It’s not Death, is it?” Midori asked.

“Nah. I like her. Wouldn’t mind if she came to visit more often.”

“Me too.” Midori deposited the Donne in the appropriate place, looked at the next book’s – a collection of discarded sketches that never made it into Samuel Johnson’s _Rover_ – catalogue number written in Lucien’s spidery, ornate handwriting. “So who is it?”

“Desire.” Matthew managed to convey volumes of distaste in a croak.

“Ugh! S/he gives me the screaming mimies. S/he’s always smiling, like s/he knows something we don’t. As if we cared.”

“You said it,” Matthew cawed, glided to the shelf where an empty space waited for the Johnson. 

Midori slid the volume into place gratefully, then balanced the stack of books on her knee while she fished inside her pocket. She pulled out a squashed worm. 

“Polly wants a cracker?” she teased. 

“I’ll Polly you from here to the Gates of Ivory!” Matthew retorted, but he swooped down gracefully and swallowed the worm before his feet touched the shelf opposite. 

Midori laughed. The sound reverberated among the endless vistas of bookshelves in Lord Morpheus’ library like a hunter’s horn at dawn. The echoes died down quickly when a pale, spectral attendant – a semi-shaped dream – approached on soundless feet and addressed her. 

“Lord Morpheus desires your presence.” 

Midori exchanged a look with Matthew. 

“Maybe he wants to congratulate you on the fine job you’ve been doing,” Matthew hazarded without much conviction. 

Midori shrugged and deposited her stack of books on the floor. “Can you tell Lucien I’ll take care of these later?”

“Sure thing,” Matthew croaked. 

“See you later, alligator,” she said with exaggerated good cheer and followed the attendant.

*

Dream was visibly upset. Well, visibly to a member of the family. To the rest of existence, he would have seemed his usual, composed self. Desire relished seeing her/his older brother squirm. 

“Why choose this occasion, Desire? It is entirely insignificant to you and your realm.”

“That is where you are mistaken, big brother. The occasion and the catalyst are both more relevant to my realm than you may think.” 

Dream stared through the open door of the throne chamber which led to his library. Lucien’s assistant would be coming through it any moment. 

“This is none of your concern,” he muttered. 

Desire’s fine-boned androgynous face appeared inches away from Dream’s grave countenance. 

“I don’t have to explain _anything_ to you!” Desire hissed. “You _lost_ to me! I chose to defer my reward until I saw fit, and you accepted that. I dare you to break your word of honor. I bloody _dare_ you!”

Dream said nothing. Desire knew Dream would never challenge her/his claim, s/he just enjoyed taunting him. 

“Very well,” Dream said. “You have chosen the girl, and I will send her on this errand. Desire?”

Desire was already walking away; s/he stopped and looked back. 

“There is a Chinese saying you may be familiar with: Do not count your gold pieces until the tax collectors have left the village.”

Desire grinned nastily. “Comfort yourself with old saws, brother. I know when I have won. When this is over, you will be forced to admit that though the girl is _your_ minion, she is entirely _my_ creature.” 

When Midori entered the throne room, she found Dream alone. He stood before the gallery of his siblings’ sigils, staring at the bloody, beating heart which can summon Desire. He seemed to be brooding, but then it was impossible to tell his moods apart, they all looked the same to casual spectators. 

“My lord, you wanted to see me?” Midori said deferentially. 

Dream turned and took in the girl’s petite figure. She was still dressed in the clothes she had died in – faded jeans, boots, battered brown leather jacket – with the short, elfin haircut that made her look even younger than she had been at the moment of death. There had been changes, too, fundamental changes. Her skin was now a uniform pale green. Her hair, eyelashes and eyebrows were a darker shade of pine green, but her eyes were still the deep, nut brown they had always been. She looked like any vulnerable teenage girl trying desperately for a veneer of toughness to get her through. 

Dream sighed. The girl mattered to him neither more nor less than any other of his subjects, but he despised Desire for picking such a fragile vessel as the conduit of her/his will. S/he could have chosen any one of a number of more experienced denizens of the Dreaming, full-fledged dreams or mighty nightmares, yet s/he insisted the task be given to this apprentice dream, Lucien’s little assistant, who had not been out in the Waking since her death. It would be far too easy for her to fail. Then Dream would have to send someone else to finish the job and clean up after Midori’s failure, besides enduring a small eternity of Desire’s gloating. 

He reminded himself of the proverb his sister/brother had disdained, and looked at Midori again. Perhaps the girl was at least fractionally as tough as she acted. All would be revealed. 

“I have a delicate task for you,” he said. 

“Yes, my lord?”

“There is a man living in New York City.” He pronounced ‘New York City’ as if it were a magical city in a fairytale land beyond belief. “He has taken the liberty of tampering with certain aspects of my realm. More precisely, he is attempting to discover the chemical formula for sleep without dreams.”

“Can there be such a thing, my lord?” Midori asked. _Damn, I’m beginning to talk like him._

“With good fortune, we will never know. It is your assignment to make sure he discontinues his research. His name is Jackson H. Williams, and he owns an experimental facility in the Bronx. He is conducting experiments using volunteers suffering from insomnia in the hope of discovering the drug that will ensure sleep without the possibility of dreaming.”

“How exactly do you want me to stop him, my lord?” 

“You will enter Jackson Williams’ dream and see for yourself why he is conducting this research. Once you have become acquainted with the nature of his affliction, you will go to the Waking and persuade him to cease his research.”

_Persuade him? How? Do you use cold, hard logic or feminine wiles on a man trying to master dreams?_

“My lord, did you say that he has only one dream?”

Dream gestured with one hand. The throne room swirled around Midori in a maelstrom of color, resolved itself into a world of green. 

She was standing in a primordial forest. A thick, silvery mist weaved between the huge, smooth trunks. The branches started about a hundred feet up, and the sky was a single canopy of leaves. The light was the pale yellow of early dawn. It penetrated the forest almost horizontally. Long shadows crouched on the ground. Silence reigned, total calm such as exists in no real forest. 

Midori picked her way through the trees and soon came to a large clearing. There she saw the man. 

He was standing in the middle of the clearing, listening intently – for what? He looked to Midori like a man whose eardrums have just been burst, and he is not yet aware of it, but can feel disorientation setting in. 

Just then a loud crash and the sounds of splintering wood came from the direction of the trees directly opposite the spot where Midori stood. The man’s face twisted in the kind of agony known to anyone suffering from chronic ulcers, he stumbled a few feet as if trying to decide which direction to take, then merely turned towards the noise and waited. His body was taut, but he did not seem at all ready to bolt, as though he were incapable of any movement. 

Midori decided it would be best if she hid behind the nearest tree. 

A few seconds later, the crashing horror appeared in the clearing, trailing broken branches. It roared so that Midori could feel her boot soles shiver. She had seen several nightmares in the Dreaming, but always when they were not being used, when they were their ‘casual’ selves. Monsters at teatime. Despite the ever-present specter of their true nature, they had not struck her as particularly threatening.

This thing was in the dream assigned to it, and it was its real self. Larger than the man, grayish-blue in color, it had four long tentacles instead of arms and a mouthful of saber-sharp teeth. Its feet were clawed, its thighs massive. It did not seem to have any other purpose but the desire to devour the helpless human cowering in the middle of the clearing. Like a monster in a movie, the whole point of its existence was reduced to that single point, the termination of one flicker of human life. 

It was ludicrous and irrevocably terrifying. It existed according to the peculiar logic of dreams. As ridiculous as it might seem in the sober light of day, in the dream it was the central point of a universe of horror. 

Midori flinched when the creature reached its prey. The man screamed. Midori clapped her hands over her ears and hazarded another peak from behind the tree.

The man would be mauled alive. Just as the creature moved to sink its teeth into his chest, where his heart was, his head whipped back and he caught a glimpse of Midori behind her tree. 

Because she was an intruder in his dream, it was his perception that determined her role in the scene being enacted. Since she had green skin and short green hair, and she stood in a hazy, primordial forest, she took on the characteristics of a forest elf. Her grungy clothes became a tiny outfit made out of what looked and felt like soft tree bark. She was embarrassed. She’d never shown that much flesh before. The tips of her ears were pointy. 

She wondered what she should do, now that she was a full-fledged part of this dream, but there was no time for any kind of heroic action involving her presumed elfin superpowers, for the creature’s teeth penetrated deep into Jackson Williams’ heart.

*

Jackson woke up screaming and cold as a corpse, as per usual. 

His room was bare, the bed the only piece of furniture in it. It had no windows and was sound-proofed. The walls were concrete, the door thick metal. It was a tomb if Jackson had ever seen one, and for the umpteenth time in his conscious life he regretted the unfortunate tendency of metaphors to describe a thing so accurately that it almost – but not quite – becomes that to which it is likened. 

He covered his head with the blanket and cried himself not back to sleep, but to a state of mind so decimated by exhaustion and despair that it was a step beyond sleep and a very few steps away from coma. It brought no rest or relief, only a kind of grim determination. He would get up in a few hours and go to the lab. Then, when he had finished work for the day, he would go to his favorite bar and get absolutely hammered. It wouldn’t help him sleep any better, but extreme inebriation was its own reward. 

*

Midori took several quick, covert glances around the throne room to make sure the man’s nightmare was over. Lord Morpheus had not moved. 

“Did he wake up?” she asked, voice quaking. She had lost the ability to tell herself 'it was just a dream' since she became part of the Dreaming. 

“Sadly, yes.”

_Sadly? What were you hoping for, he’d die of fright?_

Midori checked her clothes: back to normal. She breathed a tiny sigh of relief and then remembered what this meant. She was going back to the Waking. 

Matthew flew in from the library and perched on Dream’s forearm.

“Matthew, please escort Midori to the Gates of Ivory.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

Matthew flapped over to Midori’s shoulder. She scratched his head and he cawed affectionately. 

They left the Lord of Dreams brooding in the throne room. The griffin, the hippogriff and the wyvern wished Midori luck in her endeavor as she walked out of the castle. 

She paused at the gates carved from the tusks of elephants which had roamed the slopes of the Hindukush a very, very long time ago. 

“Matthew, I’m a little scared.”

“Can’t say I blame you, kiddo. But don’t worry, you’ll do fine. Bring me back a real live worm if you find one, eh?”

“I’ll snag you a bottle of beer too, if I can.”

Matthew whooped, rose from her shoulder, and winged his way back to the castle. Midori watched him until he disappeared, then she passed through the ornate gates, and into the Waking. 

*

The Waking had changed. Midori almost got run over by a solar-powered levitating vehicle the first time she tried to cross the street. After that, she watched out for cars moving above the ground as well as those at street level. There was more garbage on the streets, more graffiti on the walls, more people who leered at her. She ascribed the latter to the change in her appearance. 

She had no trouble finding the bar where Jackson was wont to hang out after work. It was a dimly lit, smoky place, just like the bars in old movies. A few patrons looked her up and down, then went back to their drinks. This was New York, after all, a green girl was neither here nor there, and most certainly not the oddest thing walking the streets. 

Jackson sat alone at the bar, nursing a blood-red drink. Midori climbed up onto the barstool next to him and ordered a coke. 

The bartender glared at her. “This is a bar, not a preschool hangout.”

“Like you so shrewdly noticed, I’m hardly old enough for a real drink,” she snapped back. 

Jackson giggled drunkenly at the exchange. The bartender bristled but brought her a coke with so much ice the drink had hardly any taste. Midori turned her attention to Jackson.

He looked to be in his early forties. He had blue eyes and reddish-golden hair. His skin was as white as the parchment in some of Lucien’s books. He had black bags his eyes, and his cheeks were so sunken Midori felt sorry for him. He caught her eye, smiled and gestured, his hand hanging in the air, pointing vaguely at her cheek. 

“That’s very clever,” he slurred. “Very clever indeed. Very good makeup effect.”

“It’s not makeup, it’s my skin.”

“Is that right?” He drained his drink. Midori did her best to ignore the similarity between the color of his drink and the color of his blood in the nightmare. “You must be rich to be able to afford such good surgery.”

“If I were rich, do you think I’d be hanging in a dump like this?”

Jackson laughed raucously, banging the bar with his fist. The ice in Midori’s glass chinked and danced. 

“Very good, very good!” he wheezed. “You’re a funny kid.” 

“I’ve been around longer than you might think.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is. Let’s just say that I have vivid memories of the time when the only way you could get recorded music was on vinyl.”

Jackson laughed some more, but the sound petered out as he realized she was looking at him with a deadpan expression, not challenging, merely waiting for him to start taking her seriously. 

“But you said you’re too young to drink.”

“Ah, well, you see, I forgot to mention I died somewhere in between the time I’m telling you about and now.”

Jackson picked up his glass, realized it was empty and motioned to the bartender, who refilled it while shooting dirty, I-don’t-need-no-kooks-in-my-bar looks at Midori. She ignored the bartender studiously, watched Jackson drain his glass in two gulps and rise, tossing a few credit chips on the bar.

She laid one green hand on his arm. He stared at it, took it, inspected it. He rubbed the skin between her fingers and peered at her knuckles, looking for traces of surgery. 

“Pigment injections?” he hazarded without much conviction. 

Midori shook her head. 

“Your skin?” 

She nodded. Jackson sat back down on his stool. 

“Whew! I’ve seen a lot of genetically altered specimens, but never anything like this.”

“The name’s Midori. Not ‘this’ or ‘specimen.’”

“Sorry. Midori, you say? Pretty.”

“Thanks, Jackson.”

He stared at her, didn’t drop her hand. His touch was warm and dry, disconcertingly so. He was way too old for her to fancy him. Not to mention he was a living man, and she was a technically dead denizen of the Dreaming. 

“I know lots more about you,” she said, trying to ape Death’s easy-going, tantalizingly omniscient manner. “I know what you do, and where. And I know why. I know what you dream.” 

She leaned closer. Her ear brushed the stubble on his cheek as she whispered his dream to him. 

When she pulled back, she could be sure she had his full attention. 

“How do you know all this? Who are you?”

“I told you. My name’s Midori. I work for the King of the Dreaming, and he is not happy with you.” 

“Who?”

“Keep up, will you? The Dream King, the person who controls everybody’s dreams. He doesn’t like your experiments one bit, and he wants you to stop.”

A pale blue fire crept into Jackson’s eyes. “Let’s say I believe you. If he wants me to stop, he should stop sending that God-awful dream to me every fucking night!”

Midori glanced around. A few customers were looking at them.

“How ‘bout we continue this outside?” 

He dropped her hand as if it had stung him. “How ‘bout you tell me what’s going on? You with one of the pharmaceutical companies? I already told them I’m not interested…”

She lowered her voice to a hiss. “I am _not_ with any pharmaceutical company! When I was nineteen I fell asleep in my car and caused a fatal accident. Because I was dreaming at the time of my death, I was offered a position as servant to Morpheus of the Endless, the King of Dreams. I entered his realm, the Dreaming, as an apprentice dream. This is the first time I have been back in the Waking since. The reason he sent me is he wants me to persuade you to give up your experiments. If you succeed in discovering your formula for dreamless sleep, it would disrupt his realm, not to mention the balance of this universe. People need to dream, Jackson. It’s in their nature. They need the relief, and the excitement, and the opportunity to see things from an unexpected perspective. Do you understand?”

Several minutes passed before Jackson replied. The ice in Midori’s glass had melted, the diluted coke spilling onto the bar. The bartender picked up the glass and wiped the bar with an evil look. Midori didn’t see it, so intently was she watching Jackson. 

“You say dreams give us a different perspective,” he said in a whisper like distant thunder. “Then why do I only ever get one dream, one and the same horrid perspective? Insignificance and terror.”

“I don’t know. Honest Abe I don’t. Don’t look at me that way. I’m just a messenger, you know, I don’t decide who gets which dream.” 

“Then why should I listen to you? And why should I stop my research? What is this Dream King of yours going to do to me, scare me to death? He’s been trying to do that for years, you know. And here I am, still going strong.”

“Still going like a zombie, you mean? Look at you, you’re two steps away from the loony bin! If you do this, I could probably persuade him to cut you some slack, stop that dream of yours.” 

Hardly had the words left the tip of her tongue when Midori found herself surrounded by swirling fog and shadows. Morpheus’ gaunt figure loomed over her. 

“Beware, Midori, my servant!” Her lord’s voice chilled her. “I have not given you permission to act as my go-between or to close deals in my name.”

“But my lord, I must offer him something. He will never agree to discontinue his work otherwise.”

“If he cannot be reasonably persuaded, you have my permission to destroy his laboratory and take his life, if need be. It should not present a problem, considering your history.”

Midori’s face turned an unhealthy shade of green – the color of old bruises – as the fog dissipated around her. 

“Son of a bitch!” she screamed. 

“Are you OK?” Jackson was peering at her with genuine concern. 

She stared at him unblinking, then spoke with such calm resolve Jackson felt an icy tingle wind its way down his spine. “Fine. I apologize about that, it was not meant for you. As I was saying, I can help you.”

“You mean, you can genuinely persuade him to…”

Midori put a finger to her green lips. “Ssh! The air is full of eager ears. But yes, I think I can help you.” 

She hopped down from her bar stool. “Come on, let’s go.”

“Where to?”

“Wherever it is you sleep.”

*

In the Threshold, the castle of her/his body, Desire stretched on her/his purple velvet couch like a cat lying in the sun, and smiled a bright, enchanting smile. 

“You are a fool, my brother,” s/he whispered. “Don’t you know that spite and anger are oh-so-close to Desire?”

*

Midori waited in an amorphous world of white mist, the vestibule to the forest of Jackson’s dream. She was nervous – a sensation she had not experienced since entering the Dreaming. Going back to the Waking had been cake compared to this. Matthew had just left her, extremely unhappy about Midori’s request: to distract Morpheus while Midori single-handedly took care of Jackson’s nightmare. 

She wasn’t even sure it would work. She had told Jackson what to do. She had faith in Matthew, despite the raven’s misgivings. 

She was nervous as hell. 

The forest morphed into existence around her, the clearing where the massacre of the innocent would take place straight ahead. Jackson staggered out of the forest on the other side of the clearing. The noise of breaking wood and something huge stomping through the forest disturbed the preternatural peace and quiet. The nightmare swept into the clearing, launched itself at its despairing victim. Jackson covered his face with his hands and waited for doom. 

Midori stepped into the clearing. 

The monster stopped before its fangs touched its prey’s chest, lifted its head and glared at her. Jackson turned his head and looked at her. In the power of their combined gaze, in the limited but concentrated strength of the dreamer’s ability to shape the direction of the dream, Midori was transformed again. 

She was tall, and strong, and beautiful. She wore leather and chain mail, and wielded a mighty spear. She was a teenage boy’s wet dream. She was a cartoon-style Valkyrie, and had a blood-curdling battle cry to show for it. 

She lunged at the monster with her spear. The burnished iron tip went in deep near the creature’s neck. Not deep enough to kill it. _Perhaps it can’t be killed?_ In that moment of hesitation and doubt, the monster wrenched and tore the shaft from Midori the Warrior’s hand. Screeching as its dreamblood flowed out copiously, the creature bounded away from them, toward the sheltering trees. 

Midori grabbed the bow which appeared across her chest, pulled an eagle-plumed arrow from the dream-stuff shaft on her back. She ran after the monster. Jackson picked himself up and ran after her. 

They weaved through the trees, Midori shooting arrows at the creature whenever she glimpsed it. It was hard going, but her warrior self did not get tired. She could hear Jackson panting behind her, the creature roaring in pain and distress ahead of her. 

Finally she cornered the monster against a large boulder, pulled out three arrows, shot them all at once through the nightmare’s scaly chest. The creature screamed mightily, made one last desperate lunge for its hunters. Midori jumped to the left, Jackson to the right. The creature’s bleeding body lurched through the empty space between them, and promptly vanished. Silence descended on the forest, punctuated by Jackson’s labored breathing. 

Midori stood up in one liquid motion. She flicked the sweaty tresses from her face and gave Jackson a big grin, the smile a divine huntress bestows on an acolyte. 

“Well done,” she said. “You dreamed me well.” 

“Is it dead?”

“No. At least, I don’t think so. I think it escaped into some other part of the Dreaming or another world altogether. In any case, it’s out of your dream.”

Jackson closed his eyes, sat down heavily, rested his head against a tree. Midori could practically see his face lose its perpetual cast of premature exhaustion. When he looked at her again, she was back to her petite, green-skinned, faded-jeans-and-leather-jacket self. Silver letters on the front of her black T-shirt sparkled in the early morning sunlight. 

“What is written on your shirt?”

“Secret, old man,” she grinned. 

“How old do you think I am?”

“Dunno. Forty?”

“Ouch!”

“OK, how old are you?”

“I’m twenty nine.”

“Jeez! The nightmare really aged you, didn’t it?”

“As you can see.”

“Well, now you can sleep in peace. And when you wake up, I want to go to the cinema and eat ice cream.”

“Demanding, aren’t you? High maintenance.”

“It’s not like you have any pressing engagements. I mean, you won’t be going to work anymore, _right_?”

“I guess not. Aren’t you supposed to get back? You know, to the Dreaming?”

“You can’t go back to a place you’re already at.” She sat down on the ground beside him. “Sleep now, and dream of nothing.”

She laid a hand like a fresh leaf over his eyes. 

Then, for several hours, she sat on the edge of the bed in his windowless, tomb-like room and watched him sleep the sleep of the just for the first time in more time than he cared to remember. 

She could not sleep. Dreams in the Waking are like hunted animals: always alert, always ready to run. 

*

It was late morning when Jackson woke up. He shaved and showered, and found some clean clothes. _He cleans up nicely!_ Midori thought when she saw him. _Whaddya know?_ He was still sickly pale and thin, with dark shadows around his eyes and a slightly twitchy manner, but girls paid attention to him when they went out into the street. The sun almost broke through the thick aerial pollution, and it felt good to be out in the Waking. Midori took Jackson’s arm and skipped as they walked, humming ‘Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,’ much to his amusement. 

They went into a dilapidated cinema showing a double bill of _Bringing Up Baby_ and _Some Like It Hot_ , then strolled through Central Park. Midori insisted on feeding the swans even though Jackson explained that they were mechanical replicas, the real swans having died from pollution years ago. She then burrowed in the ground for worms, but there were none: the grass was artificial. Jackson persuaded her to give up and have some ice cream instead. 

There were more flavors and colors than Midori remembered. Their cones came complete with a genetically modified cherry on top: large as a quail’s egg and swollen with red juice. 

“So what’s it like, working for the Dream King?” Jackson asked as they sat on vertiginous stools by the grimy store window. 

“OK, I guess,” she shrugged. She was still deeply pissed with the boss for dismissing her as a natural-born destroyer because of the way she had died. “Better than being dead.” 

“How would you know?” he teased. “You’re not exactly dead like most dead people.”

She stuck her tongue out at him. Emboldened by this show of girlish petulance, he put out his hand and pulled her battered jacket open.

Her T-shirt sported the inscription: IN DREAMS NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU SCREAM. 

Midori’s cheeks turned a more intense shade of green. “I thought it was funny,” she muttered. “I got the shirt when _Alien_ opened, but then it changed.”

Jackson was staring at her the way Odysseus must have stared at Naussicäa’s kind patrician face as he lay sunburned, salt-mad and half-dead on her father’s shore. Midori bit the cherry from her ice cream in two nervously. The juice stained her mouth and teeth red. 

“Hey!” he exclaimed, smiling. “You look like a Christmas pudding.”

“What?”

“See, you’ve got red and green for holly,” he said, indicating her skin and mouth, “and brown for chocolate.” He leaned close and kissed her right eye. Her eyelid trembled beneath his lips like a young bird caught in a snare. Then he moved to kiss her mouth. 

The screaming interrupted. Midori felt the fabric of waking reality rip, letting loose something from another plane. 

Midori and Jackson separated, turned their heads in time to see Jackson’s nightmare charge them like a bull seeing red. Its body was covered in scabbed wounds which slowed it down not a whit. Cars stopped abruptly in its path. It jumped over the hoods as if they were a skipping rope, landed on the sidewalk before the ice cream store. Its yellow eyes fixed on Midori, who was already off her stool and dragging Jackson by the sleeve. 

“Oh hell,” he breathed. “So this is where it escaped!”

He followed Midori into the back of the store as the creature burst through the glass front, spattered the wall behind the counter with the blood of a dumbfounded waitress. 

Midori concentrated as she ran. She summoned up the image of a gap between the Waking and the Dreaming, a place where dreams and tangible reality intersected, where nothing was solid or reliable. Jackson and she ran out the back door of the ice cream store and into a trash-littered alley. Midori concentrated so hard sweat soaked the back of her T-shirt. She never let go of Jackson’s hand.

Then the concrete beneath her feet vanished and was replaced by rolling night-blue waves. She stopped so abruptly Jackson ran right past her, lost hold of her hand, fell to his knees and started to sink. Midori grabbed his shoulder. With just a light tug, he was standing beside her again. 

Jackson wiped his face and licked the water from his hand: it was salt. They were standing on the surface of a cove. Familiar stars were out. The shore was just an indistinct rolling line far away in the night. Close at hand, a rudimentary hut on a rocky islet bobbed on the tiny waves. 

“Where are we?” he managed to say after the first shock had passed and he realized he wasn’t sinking like a stone. He couldn’t swim.

“This is a soft place, where dreams and reality are mixed.” Midori’s voice was oddly comforting. Her eyes shone like the eyes of a cat. “Through here we will reach the Dreaming, and hide.” She took Jackson’s hand again. “Walk slowly, there’s no use running, it’ll only slow you down.”

“The faster you run, the farther your goal gets,” Jackson muttered. 

“Sometimes. Come on.”

*

In the seventh century after Christ, a lonely monk lived with his cat in the hut on an islet off the coast of Ireland. He did not know his home was a soft place, and was often deeply disturbed by the strange visions that disturbed his prayers and haunted his nighttime hours. 

Never was he more terrified than when he looked out of his sole window one clear summer’s night, and saw a pale man and a green-skinned girl walking on water near his islet. Before his very eyes, a devil from hell was leading a mortal soul by the hand. The monk fell back from the window, crossed himself and prayed furiously. Some time passed and then his cat started spitting and hissing, arching its back and backing away from the window. 

The monk steeled himself and looked out again. 

An inhuman terror with four long tentacles for arms was trying to hurry across the water, but the superhuman exertion its horrendous body made was slowing it down. It wailed in frustration so that the monk’s single candle shook in its horn candlestick and went out. The cat yelped and hid under the lectern which supported the Bible the monk had been illuminating for more than ten years. The lectern rocked, the heavy volume fell, its fragile spine breaking on the floor, scattering hand-bound pages with delicate images of the twining dragons and pale angels that sometimes visited the monk’s anxious vigils. 

The monk lay down on his straw pallet and stayed there for a week, burning with fever, praying for strength of spirit and firmness of faith. 

*

“Now run!”

Midori tugged on Jackson’s hand impatiently. He was staring all around, his mouth hanging open. Midori slapped him. He shut his mouth and focused on her. 

“Come on!” she screamed at him.

They were inside a huge arcade dimply lit by torches. There were a lot of people present, dressed in quasi-Roman togas, ancient evening wear as imagined by an amateur director of Anthony and Cleopatra, and they were just beginning to engage in the most depraved orgy a mind obsessed with the presumed libertinism of the past could conceive. Clothes were being quickly discarded as every sexual combination known to man, woman or animal formed itself before Jackson’s astounded eyes. He followed Midori at a brisk pace as the classical orgy morphed into the interior of a flashy nightclub, where scantily dressed men and women ground against each other to a throbbing techno tune under strobing multicolored lights. 

Midori led him through a maze of dreams, which flashed past like pictures in a bizarre museum as they ran and ran, trying desperately to lose the pursuing horror. 

They ran past an idyllic rivulet. A little girl in a pink dress screamed and swung the end of an oar at the head of a red-eyed ghoul stretched out at the water’s edge. The ghoul picked the petals off a violet and repeated over and over again, like a broken record: “Oh why can’t I just be a lover?” The girl screamed and hit the ghoul, which repeated its lazy plea. Scream, thunk, complain. And so on. 

They ran through a Japanese house, which may have been made out of sunlight and air or wooden frames and paper screens. Inside it, between the shafts of golden light, beautiful lithe androgynous figures dressed in kimonos covered with images of stars, suns and cranes performed elegant dances, playfully crossed swords so sharp they could cleave a man’s soul in two. One blade nearly brushed Jackson’s left shoulder as they hurried past.

They ran down a canyon while cowboys on horseback thundered all around them, the desert sun beat down on the backs of their heads and plastered their clothes to their backs with frightful realism, and John Wayne and Robert Mitchum traded juicy insults with the dreamer’s mother over their heads. On the horizon, the departing rumps of a dozen piebald mounts shrouded a posse of brilliantly painted Indians in dust bleached bone-white by the sun. 

They ran through the only room of a ramshackle house in which an old woman so shrunken and withered she looked like the Wicked Witch of the West past her prime stopped spinning gray wool for a moment to watch them pass. She made the sign against the evil eye, and they raced on. 

They ran through Technicolor landscapes and bleak, hellish regions. 

They ran past skyscrapers from which dreamers plunged to their screaming deaths only to vanish at the moment of impact. 

They passed boxing matches, and alabaster-white halls full of soap balloons, and balls where all the princesses were ogres and all the princes were cowards. 

They ran through an orchard where frogs grew on trees and apples croaked all the summer’s night long, then passed a row of expensive shops advertising a wild variety of bodily waste at exorbitant prices. A king’s feces for a late Roman coin, all green with mold! A pint of virgin’s menstrual blood for one third of your living heart! 

They turned a corner as a wizened tradesman tried to attract them to inspect his merchandise, and found themselves in a forest of tall trees with smooth trunks, interlaced with silver fog, the horizontal rays of the early morning sun gilding it a deceptively soft honey color. Beneath the distant treetops stood a tall, gaunt figure with white skin and black eyes, wrapped in a coat of many colors, the night’s darkest reaches hidden in its folds. 

Midori skidded to a stop, gasping. Jackson collided with her from behind, her head smacking him painfully in the chest. The pale man lifted a majestic, bony hand, and Midori felt her dream-consciousness fade, the feel of Jackson’s warm flesh and labored breathing dissipating behind her. She barely heard the crash of timber and the approach of a large, ravenous creature on their heels.

*

She opened her eyes and beheld a vaguely familiar, hideously dirty back alley. She was sitting propped up against an oily brick wall, and the sliver of sky visible between the buildings on both sides of the alley was orange with pollution and sunset. 

Jackson lay on his back a few feet further down the alley. His neck was broken, and his heart had been torn from his chest. He had died in the Dreaming, but he had been wide-awake when it happened, and so was lost to her forever. 

Midori curled up and wailed like a cat being skinned alive, feeling Despair’s cruel fishhooks burrow deep into her heart. She did not see the look of pity the second eldest of the Endless gave her, nor did she hear Death murmur "Poor kid" as she caught the immaterial arm Jackson stretched toward Midori’s miserable form. All she felt was a light breeze, which stirred the loose garbage in the alley around her, as she waited patiently for Dream to claim her. 

*

Dream closed the carved ebony box that would be the resting place of the monster which had plagued the dreams of one Jackson H. Williams, deceased. There the monster – a good and obedient nightmare – would slumber until such a time when Dream deemed it appropriate to use the monster again, if ever. 

Matthew watched this from a tiny gold cage, which was too narrow for him to stretch his legs, let alone his wings. His beak was sealed shut by a powerful spell, so that he suffered pangs of hunger as well as enforced silence – punishment for his collusion in Midori’s plot to subvert Lord Morpheus’ direct orders. 

Dream looked out of one of many windows giving onto different parts of the Dreaming, and beheld Midori’s immobile figure in her lair, a large, dry, comfortable hole in the ground which she inhabited when Lucien did not need her help stacking books. She lay on a pile of leaves as soft as goose down. Her eyes were closed, her skin such a pale green it was almost yellow. Her ears remained pointy, for she had been changed by the power of a dreamer’s will. She, too, waited under a spell for Morpheus to devise a suitably harrowing punishment for her transgressions. 

A nervous throat was cleared behind Dream’s back: a sound like the turning of pages so old they might crumble to dust at any moment. 

“What is it, Lucien?”

“Forgive me, my lord, but her ladyship your elder sister wishes to see you. She is waiting in the North Vestibule.”

“I see. Thank you, Lucien.”

The librarian bowed and exited on tiptoe. No denizen of the Dreaming dared so much as breathe loudly around Lord Morpheus since the affair of the apprentice dream and the castaway human. Lucien was loyal to his master for all eternity, yet he could not help heaving a sigh of relief to be out of his presence. Just a tiny sigh, mind, nothing too ostentatious. 

*

Death was playing a game of patience at a small silver table by a window overlooking Fiddler’s Green. Sweet summer breezes stirred her pitch-black hair. She seemed intent on her game when Dream entered the North Vestibule. 

He waited for her to address him, but she did not. This was odd, given her temperament. Dream waited out of respect for his sister, though he would not usually suffer waiting within his own realm. 

Death picked another card from the top of her deck, laid it down. Dream saw that it was Judgment, and the image on it was that of a pale man with dark hair and eyes like the bottomless pit, holding a sword and scales. 

“Funny, isn’t it,” Death said. “Sword, scales – Justice usually holds those, don’t you think?” She looked at her younger brother at last, but she did no smile. “No blindfold, though. Must be feeling pretty sure of himself.” 

“What can I do for you, my sister?”

Death put down the remaining cards – the top one, number XIII, represented a young woman with black hair and a huge, friendly smile standing in a field covered with scattered bones – leaned her elbows on the silver table and wove her fingers under her chin. “I have come to ask for a favor.”

“You know that I will grant you anything in my power.”

“Go easy on the girl. She meant no harm.”

Dream tensed visibly – well, it was visible to a family member. “I am quite sure that I do not understand your meaning, sister.”

“And I’m quite sure that you’re full of it!” 

Death rose and faced him. They squared off for a moment, both fuming silently. Dream was the first to break off eye contact as he strode over to the window and looked out at the perfect serenity of Fiddler’s Green. 

“No punishment is too great for what she did. She broke two fundamental laws of my realm. She brought a living mortal into the Dreaming, and she attempted to kill another of my servants, a full-fledged dream, no less!”

“So what? No great harm came to the Dreaming, did it? _Well, did it?_ ”

“That is beside the point, sister. There must always be rules, in my realm as in yours. You know this.”

“Yes, brother, I do not deny it. But consider: she did it for a very singular reason. A reason which caused even you to act foolishly in the past…”

Memories of moments he had once spent walking through Fiddler’s Green in the company of another flooded in on Morpheus. He felt compelled to turn away from the window.

“It makes no difference,” he murmured. “She must be punished.”

Death stood before him. “I am not telling you to let her go scot free. All I’m asking is that you do not judge her more harshly because she wounded your personal vanity. Those rules were your babies. You thought no one would dare break them, that the Dreaming couldn’t exist without them. But you are not the Dreaming, brother, though you are its soul. The Dreaming rests on more than a set of rules you devised such a long time ago…”

She touched Dream’s face and smiled a little, as gently as only Death can. Dream let her. She was the only person from whom he would suffer such tenderness. 

“Desire certainly played me for a fool,” he muttered. 

“Desire tricked you. That game of cards – it was rigged from the start. Didn’t you know?”

“Of course I knew. But I could not very well let Desire’s insults pass unanswered. Nor could I go back on my honor once s/he had won the game, even if it had been ‘rigged’, as you put it. I would be no different from her/him otherwise.”

“I wonder if it has ever occurred to you that we Endless do not merely move mortals for our separate ends. We are in each other’s power, as well.” 

“I have often thought it, sister. I do not find it a very productive train of thought.” 

“I know.” 

They stood in silence by the open window, brother and sister, watching the view. Then, Death smiled. 

“I think I have an idea for you to get one over on Desire. A little payback, you know? Plus, it would be something nice for Midori.”

Dream did not respond at once. “Yes?”

Death beckoned him closer, rose up on tiptoe and whispered into his ear. 

Dream blinked incredulously at his sister’s mischievous expression. “You suggest I break the third rule of my realm _myself_?”

“Oh come on, Dream, we’ve been through this. No harm can come of it, and Desire will eat her/his heart out when s/he sees you all merciful and flexible.” 

“I rest unconvinced.”

Death sighed, rolled her eyes exaggeratedly, picked up the cards. “Destiny gave me these a while ago. Said I could see the contents of his book in them, when the time was right. And guess what?”

Death removed the top card, the one with her own likeness, and showed Dream the card underneath. 

Lovers. 

A couple holding hands. A thin man with blue, sunken eyes, and a girl with pale green skin, as bright and alert as a fox. 

Dream took the card and gazed at it a long time. Then he looked at his sister. She shrugged and smiled, hoping Dream never decided to mention her little fib to Destiny. 

The cards were indeed old, but Destiny was too tight-fisted to tell anyone what was in his book. 

*

Midori was in a white and featureless place. The only shape other than herself was a sleek computer terminal. A man worked on it, his back to Midori. He had hair like old gold. Midori wanted to speak, but found that there were neither tongue nor lungs nor heart left inside her. 

It took eons for the man to notice her. When eventually he looked over his shoulder and spotted her, his face broke into a huge grin and his blue eyes sparkled. He stood up and approached her in two long, easy strides. His arms were warm and alive around her, and his mouth was open and welcoming. 

*

Dream’s errant minion would keep no residual memory of this, the only recorded dream ever dreamed by a denizen of the Dreaming. Even so, it comforted her as she lay motionless in her hole in the ground. Dream decided to keep her enthralled in her little cave of sleep for at least ten thousand years, until he could bring himself to think about her disobedience calmly, and perhaps devise a new use for her. 

Matthew he released from confinement a mere decade later. The raven took extra care to watch his step _and_ his flight for a long time afterward. 

In the Waking some slept and dreamt, some woke screaming, and some tossed and turned, imploring and cursing Sleep and Dream by turns. 

Morpheus kept a much tighter watch on the conduct of his minions. He discouraged them from fraternizing with creatures from the Waking as well as quarrels and conflict amongst themselves, and especially from wishing for dreams of their own. His subjects were mostly understanding. 

Dream does not play cards anymore, although his older sister often tries to tease him into helping her with a game of patience. Dream loves his sister, which is why he suffers her gentle barbs. 

Sometimes he wanders the corridors and halls of his castle, never meaning to go to the North Vestibule, yet somehow always arriving there. He stands at the window overlooking Fiddler’s Green, takes out the Lovers card from his sister’s deck, and studies it in between long periods of gazing at the flawless dreamscape that stretches before him. And perhaps, if only for a moment, he dreams.


End file.
